Lovers and Strangers by Clair Wills

Author:Clair Wills
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141974965
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

This shared drinking culture was the public face of the bachelor houses – as for the Irish men living in digs who found they had nowhere to go in the evenings and at weekends, the pubs were a refuge. But they were also places where ‘back home’ could be recreated, through reminiscence, jokes, storytelling and songs – the very existence of Madho Ram’s poem is testament to this. The poem, and many others like it, was recited regularly over the years in shared gatherings, growing and altering as events took place and were incorporated into it: the hardships of bachelor life, the arrival of wives from India, buying a house, the birth of children. Poems and songs like this were shared performances, with the audience thumping out the rhythm with their feet, joining in on repeated phrases and dancing or shouting the refrains. The atmosphere was closest to one we might now associate with karaoke. For these were entirely traditional and familiar oral forms – the boliyan were harvest songs customarily performed to the measure of frenetic dancing, the forerunner of later bhangra styles; the rather more sedate qissa had an even longer history, in oral tales of romantic love stretching back to the eighteenth century. While the subjects of these songs had traditionally been life and love in the Punjab, now they focused on the challenges of the new world of the migrant. And if the songs themselves are anything to go by, chief among these challenges for Punjabi men was the new power and forthrightness of their womenfolk, which forms the basis of literally hundreds of witty boliyan composed in England in the 1960s. By translating the new world of work and relationships into old styles, the songs, and the shared performance of them in the pubs, acted as forms of socialization, ways of bringing the new situation home. Like the world of traditional Irish music, which was opened up and expanded when previously isolated rural migrants met together in the pubs of London and Birmingham, Punjabi cultural expression was given a fillip by the economic conditions in which the migrants lived – in men-only digs, working long shifts, moving from foundry and factory to the pub, and back again. And like Irish music, traditional Punjabi culture was entirely vernacular. Punjabis knew Urdu and a little English, but it was Punjabi that was spoken at home, and the language of community rituals, fairs, and so on. Paradoxically this rural, oral tradition was given new life by industrial settlement.10

The poems and songs celebrated, and poked fun at, shared experiences across tribal and caste lines: getting your first job in England, managing the heavy work and long hours, having your wife find out about your affair, your wife’s delight at the décor of her English terraced house (‘flowers on the floor, flowers on the walls’), the extraordinary generosity of the welfare state (where children get ‘money, milk, and a lot of attention’), the joy of two opening times in the

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